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Boots' use of advanced SEO tactics pays off in search rankings: report

Boots stands head and shoulders above its competitors in the beauty industry in terms of SEO, according to a new report from 4Ps Marketing.

The report, written by SEO director Hannah Miller, focuses on eight keywords that potential customers might search for in this industry, with the aim of investigating how more technically advanced SEO strategies can impact search rankings.

It compares five of the UK’s top beauty brands, including Boots, Lloyds Pharmacy, Avon, The Body Shop and Superdrug.

Here is a look at some of the predefined SEO techniques and how they affected the rankings...

Indexed Pages

Reviewing the number of indexed pages helps to gauge the size of the website and uptake of search engine crawlers.

It shows that Boots has a considerably larger number of URLs indexed in both Google and Bing, which could be due to the product range it currently supplies.

It’s also interesting to note the huge difference in the number of pages indexed by each search engine.

Google Shopping Feed

Google Shopping is an important source of traffic for a number of retailers and on average achieves twice the CTR of comparable text ads in AdWords.

But the system is undergoing a fundamental change at the moment in moving from a free to a paid-for service, so it will only be available to merchants that are Product Listing Ads (PLA) customers.

Mobile website

Google advocates responsive design for mobile sites, but also suggests two other options; a site that dynamically serves all devices on the same set of URLs, but using different HTML; or a separate ‘m.’ mobile site.

The report found that none of the five beauty brands had used responsive design, and only Boots and The Body Shop had built separate mobile optimised sites.

Canonical/pagination tags

For retail websites, canonical and pagination tags can be used to inform search engines when duplication of content occurs and how URLs are related to one another.

They were created in order to combat sites that deliberately duplicated content to manipulate search engines, and allowing site owners to overcome the risk of being penalised for innocent duplication.

Both Superdrug and Lloyds show extensive use of canonical tags, so appear to understand the need for them. Avon is the only site not to have implemented any tags at all.

The report points out that tags aren’t necessarily the right process for all websites, but they are “an indication that an SEO strategy is active and up-to-date.”

Keyword evaluation

Finally, the report used DuckDuckGo and SEOMoz to analyse keyword performance among the five brands. It used a mix of broad and specific keywords to get a snapshot of the average rankings positions.

It also used a points system, where two points were allocated for the highest search ranking (green) and one point for the second highest search ranking (orange).

Please click on the chart to see an enlarged version

Overall Boots was easily the top performer with 27 points, while Lloyds achieved zero points.

In conclusion...

The question the report asked at the beginning was whether it’s important to integrate new SEO techniques as they are released, and the predictable answer was ‘yes’.

Boots has a far more advanced SEO strategy than its competitors and as a result is more visible in search rankings.

Overall four out of the five brands analysed appear to be adapting their sites to incorporate some of the more advanced techniques and comply with search engine suggestions, however at to very differing degrees.

It's interesting to see that three of the brands have yet to build mobile sites, which means they will be losing out on traffic and sales to their more advanced competitors.

The author also notes that rankings fluctuated considerably during the drafting of the report, and other online and offline retailers (such as ASOS, Benefit and Harrods) consistently featured prominently for the keywords.

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Paul North, Head of Content and Strategy at Mediarun

Really good post. For all the people claiming "SEO is dead", "it's just about good content now" etc, please take note of the above. This is what SEO also involves (as well as great content, social strategy, outreach, UX, keyword strategy etc...) and seeing Boots' position over their competitors is testament to its importance.

over 4 years ago

Sinead Miller

Interesting article. In addition to the above, I wonder how much bearing social signals are having on Boots' performance - given their brand I'd expect there is more social buzz around them.

Interesting of you to use the presence of canonical tags as measure. As it happens, I recently analysed Boots as part of a competitor audit for one of my clients. If you check out their back link profile, you'll see they have by far the most links from powerful domains (.edu .ac.uk and .gov). These links mostly come from local council and university sites, as Boots are often listed (and linked to) in the 'town guide' sections as a local pharmacy.

They also have a very high portion of links containing brand terms, which makes you think that co-citation could also be an influential factor in their dominant rankings.

over 4 years ago

Christopher Dugdale, SEO Manager at TescoEnterprise

Do you think the number of pages indexed and the use of canonical link elements might be related? Tighter duplicate content control = fewer pages indexed.

I have never understood people who use number of pages indexed as a measure of success; it seems like a school-boy error from 2004 - especially when going on to discuss duplicate content control.

The brands used are hardly equals either. Body Shop and Avon only sell their own products, so will always have a smaller inventory - thus fewer indexed pages.

@Paul Thanks for your comment. Integrated strategies are certainly the most successful, and a good content strategy should feed into all of the above. I think the key takeaway here is that some companies have yet to do the basics and some are pioneering.

@Christopher Thanks for your comment too. I find that using the number of pages indexed is a good way of comparing the size of the website so we can gauge the difference when comparing as more of a benchmark. In certain circumstances, the larger the website, the more products/content and therefore potentially more opportunities to increase keyword visibility.

You're right on the brands being measured, I had the same thoughts when compiling the report, but when you see the keywords we were using, they are all keywords that each of the brands may have marketing objectives for. I find the "competition" discussion really interesting because an offline competitor isn’t always an online competitor.

over 4 years ago

Stephanie Villegas-Ross, Digital Strategist at 4Ps Marketing

I think the number of URLs indexed is interesting from a duplicate content and crawler error/rate point of view, in particular how the Bing and Google respond to these differently.

In my experience large discrepancies between the two can 99 times out of 100 be brought back to the above. Bing pretty much confirmed this last year when they said that they have a 1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap.
Duane Forrester (Senior Product Manager, Bing Webmaster Tools) on this - "I'm going to start distrusting your sitemap and I'm just not going to bother with it anymore."

So when you consider their stance on messy sitemaps it’s pretty obvious how they’re going to feel about a large site like Boots and their duplicate content issues and the usual out of stock product 404s, even so 1 million fewer URLs is a lot.

Actually this post has said everything. Now a day people think that SEO is death due to the failure of handling Google Panda and Penguin algorithm updates. My point of view is SEO will not die because people are really innovative. So they can find a solution all the time.

over 4 years ago

Steven

This "report" is not displaying advanced SEO tactics in my opinion.
You also should not be including Avon and The Body shop which operates in a slightly different vertical and will there for have less products - less content, less visibility and less authority.
This is bringing down the reputation of this site.

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